The Project Gutenberg EBook of Society for Pure English, Tract 5
by Society for Pure English

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Title: Society for Pure English, Tract 5
The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems

Author: Society for Pure English

Release Date: June 5, 2004 [EBook #12524]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_S.P.E._

_TRACT No. V_

THE ENGLISHING OF FRENCH WORDS

By Brander Matthews

THE DIALECTAL WORDS IN BLUNDEN'S POEMS

etc. by Robert Bridges

_At the Clarendon Press_ MDCCCCXXI

FRENCH WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

I

The English language is an Inn of Strange Meetings where all sorts and
conditions of words are assembled. Some are of the bluest blood and of
authentic royal descent; and some are children of the gutter not wise
enough to know their own fathers. Some are natives whose ancestors were
rooted in the soil since a day whereof the memory of man runneth not to
the contrary; and some are strangers of outlandish origin, coming to us
from all the shores of all the Seven Seas either to tarry awhile and
then to depart for ever, unwelcome sojourners only, or to settle down
at last and found a family soon asserting equality with the oldest
inhabitants of the vocabulary. Seafaring terms came to us from
Scandinavia and from the Low Countries. Words of warfare on land crossed
the channel, in exchange for words of warfare at sea which migrated from
England to France. Dead tongues, Greek and Latin, have been revived to
replenish our verbal population with the terms needed for the sciences;
and Italy has sent us a host of words by the fine arts.

The stream of immigrants from the French language has been for almost a
thousand years larger than that from any other tongue; and even to-day
it shows little sign of lessening. Of all the strangers within our gates
none are more warmly received than those which come to us from across
the Straits of Dover. None are more swiftly able to make themselves
at home in our dic